Adebayo Akinfenwa has been an icon of English football for years, but last spring he hung up his boots and is now ready for his world football debut. professional wrestling. Next week the former player will make his in-ring debut five months after retiring from the green rectangle.
After a brief stint in Lithuania, where he ended up thanks to the Lithuanian wife of his agent’s brother, he returned to the UK playing for several teams, including Swansea, Millwall, Wimbledon and Wycombe, with which it gained promotion in Football League Championship and received the praise of his idol Klopp with a video message on WhatsApp.
After a 21-year career among the smaller fields of British football, and the League One play-off final that saw his Wycome Wanderers trailing 2-0 to Sunderland at Wembley, the 40-year-old will make his first appearance in his new guise on October 23. For years it was defined “the strongest football player in the world”, with reference more to the physique than to his technical abilities; and his career was accompanied by the phrase “it’s too big to play football” but now we have turned the page.
The former striker has always been a wrestling fan and decided to give it a try because, as he himself confessed, he was always open to “New experiences”. Akinfenwa in an interview with the British tabloid daily mail he declared: “I was always asked what I would do when I retired and the answer was always ‘new experiences.’ It’s a second love for me.”
The former player continued his speech always talking about wrestling and his friendship with Antonio Ogogo: “I’ve known him for a while, years, we met when he was a boxer and we kept in touch. S.luckily he couldn’t box anymore, but when he discovered my love for wrestling he said: ‘Look, do you want to try?’. When you find something you like, it gets easier. You have to have the mindset of trying new things and if it works, it works. I like it, I liked the training, I like it because it’s very intense.”
Akinfenwa trained with the WWE superstar Sheamus last month and admitted that although there is a lot of choreography, it is very “real” and “hurts”. The former player added: “I’ve tried and I’m not going to lie, it hurts and it’s not easy. Anyone who has seen me play football knows how much difficulty I had, how long it took me to establish myself and it will take even longer to do the same in wrestling.”
Adebayo Akinfenwa has no intention of being a meteor in wrestling and wants to work as hard as possible to get satisfactory results soon: “My goal, as with everything I do in life, is to play my best. I strive to do my best in anything and get as high as possible. It’s been that way as a footballer and it will be for whatever I want. . do . in the future”.
Next weekend he will visit his former Wycombe teammates, who will play Peterborough in League One, and will certainly invite them to his first in-ring show. This is how Akinfenwa is made.
Source: Fan Page IT
I’m George Gonzalez, a professional journalist and author at The Nation View. With more than 5 years of experience in the field, I specialize in covering sports news for various print media outlets. My passion for writing has enabled me to craft stories that capture the attention of readers all over the world.
